The quiet crisis
You walk into a meeting needing one number. The number exists. It's in the analytics tool β or possibly the CRM β or in the spreadsheet Finance maintains separately. Two of those numbers don't match. You pick the one that feels closest, make the decision, move on.
This happens four times a week. Over a year it becomes a pattern: decisions made on the data within reach, not the data that exists. Sometimes those are the same. Often they aren't.
The data is everywhere. The decision happens anyway. Whether they meet is luck.
What this actually looks like
A product lead is choosing between two roadmap directions. The numbers for option A live in mixpanel; the numbers for option B require a SQL pull from a different team. The SQL takes two days. The roadmap can't wait two days.
She picks the option backed by the easy data. It's a reasonable choice β except it's not a choice about the options, it's a choice about which option was queryable. The other option might have won on data. We'll never know.
This is the hidden tax of data scatter: the org systematically biases toward decisions that fit the available data, not the right data. The fix isn't more dashboards. It's a layer that can answer questions across tools β and surface the answer before the meeting ends.